How to reduce inodes usage on your plan

What is an inode?

An inode is a data structure used to represent a filesystem object, which can be one of various things including a file or a directory. Each file has a single inode, even though they can have different names.

In other words, the number of inodes equals the total number of files and directories on your hosting plan. To ensure optimal performances, we limit the number of inodes to 250 000 per hosting plan.

Where can I see how many inodes I use?

To check how many inodes are used, log in to your cPanel. In the left sidebar, click on the Statistics icon. Under Disk Space, you will find Files Usage. This equals to your inode usage.

How to reduce inode usage?

There are several ways to reduce inode usage.

Delete useless files, old backups and websites

In your cPanel with the File Manager or through a FTP client, you can easily sort and delete files and directories that are not necessary. These can be scripts not in use, old development websites, unused image files...

Remove cache files

Some applications (such as Joomla, Drupal or WordPress for instance) generate a number of cache files used to improve performances. Verifying how big these cache files are and deleting them once in a while is a good practice. You should be able to remove cache files easily directly in the app.

Archive old emails

Every email on your hosting plan adds up to the total number of inodes. It is a good practice to archive older emails or to transfer them to your computer to limit their size on the server.

Also, it is necessary to check the catchall email address that can accumulates thousands of emails and therefore inodes.

Verify where error messages from scripts and CRON tasks go

If your CRON tasks generate error messages, they can be stored (and take a lot of room) on your server. It is important to check where the error messages go in order to reduce inode usage.